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People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. Welcome to From On High.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Be Mad At Those Who Caused The Calamity

It drives me nuts when I hear someone say the investment markets caused the economic crisis we've been dealing with for the last four years because they were "unregulated." Abject ignorance has that effect on me.

The truth? Regulators - beginning with do-gooder Democratic congressmen - were the cause.

There is no mystery where the Occupy Wall Street movement came from: It is an offspring of the same false narrative about the causes of the financial crisis that exculpated the government and brought us the Dodd-Frank Act. According to this story, the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession was caused by a reckless private sector driven by greed and insufficiently regulated. It is no wonder that people who hear this tale repeated endlessly in the media turn on Wall Street to express their frustration with the current conditions in the economy.

Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government's housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis. [link]

Read the whole thing.

It comes down to this: The government, with pressure applied by the likes of Barney Frank, forced banks to hand out loans to people too poor to ever repay them. 27 million of them. The unavoidable disaster resulted when the loans went into default by the millions and foreclosures became our way of life. And we are where we are.

So don't listen to those children demonstrating in the streets of New York. They haven't a clue.

As for government regulation, nobody can rightly argue that we can do without it. It has its place. But we can certainly demand - with this debacle fresh in our memories - that government regulation do no harm. And for those responsible for this tragedy -starting with Barney Frank - to be punished.